Because this means the most powerful man in the West thinks a global warming treaty is more important than the communist government in Beijing, which over the past 70 years has murdered tens of millions of its own citizens. At the very moment the president was in town, Beijing was torturing and imprisoning tens of thousands of political and religious prisoners, forcibly aborting Chinese babies and censoring ideas both foreign and domestic. “There is no freedom of religion in China, there is no freedom of speech in China,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation Executive Director Marion Smith told The Daily Caller fresh off a trip to Hong Kong. “It is an authoritarian state totally ruled by the Communist Party.”

So just what’s in this global warming treaty the Obama administration thinks is more important than the U.S. economy, preserving a free island under threat from dictatorship, protecting our military and technological interests, hedging an expansive aggressor and addressing systemic human rights abuses?

So essentially, Messrs. Obama and Kerry accomplished less than nothing while hailing it as a “milestone” that shows how “serious” the United States is.

“It’s pretty strange that, globally, not only the U.N., but developed country leaders are spending so much time on, quote, climate change,” Peabody Energy CEO Greg Boyce said last week. “They aren’t focusing on how you eliminate poverty, eliminate energy poverty and start driving global economic activity.”

“Does the administration actually listen when people start saying there are aspects of Chinese behavior that are extremely worrisome, extremely dangerous, and they don’t seem to be cutting back?” the Heritage Foundation Asian Studies Center’s Dean Cheng asked TheDC. “Signing another agreement, another joint statement, is not going to change that. Because what we’ve seen is the Chinese initial these agreements, and then plow forward.”

But Wednesday morning’s revelations really bring the entire debacle of Mr. Obama’s foreign policy nightmare into focus: The president of the United States is not “serious” in his priorities, in his words or in his deeds. And every world leader, from Syria to China, Iran to Russia, Israel to Ukraine, knows it.